Why are feminists dismissing women’s fears about migrant crime?

Does a rape victim feel any less traumatised when her attacker is a migrant? Is it somehow less offensive to be catcalled by men whose accents you can’t quite place? Should British women simply shut up for the sake of ‘social cohesion’?

After months of rumbling protests outside migrant hotels across the country, Britain’s professional class of feminists has finally stepped up – not to answer these questions, but to tell nasty British oiks to pipe down. An open letter, signed last week by over 100 women’s organisations, sought to remind us all that sexual violence has always been a regrettable part of British culture – and that women concerned about migrant crime ought not to make a fuss.

Entitled ‘Not in Our Name’, the leaders of women’s services declare: ‘Violence against women and girls is carried out in our workplaces, in our schools, in our streets and most commonly, in our homes. It is an uncomfortable reality that it is committed in every economic group, ethnicity, age and social group, and overwhelmingly by the men who are in women and girls’ lives.’

The letter goes on to scold Labour ministers for acknowledging that there might be ‘legitimate concerns’ driving the protests outside hotels, warning that such comments risk ‘normalising and enabling the spreading of racist narratives by the far right’. ‘Not only do these falsehoods fail to keep women safe, they serve as a racist distraction that actively impedes the urgent work of addressing gender-based violence’, it adds.

It is true that most rapists are known to their victims, and that for many women the home remains the most dangerous place to be. But it is also true that several migrant-hotel residents have been charged for alleged sexual assaults, including against children.

What’s more, rates of sexual violence vary dramatically across the world. To imagine that men raised in, say, Afghanistan – where girls are bartered into marriage and rape is seen as a stain on the victim, not the perpetrator – simply shed those values once they cross the Channel is, at best, dangerously naïve. The real fears and experiences of British women and girls who report being harassed, assaulted and in some cases raped by such men must not be minimised. We cannot let a ‘progressive’ political ideal override material reality.

The response to these reports should not be to damn every migrant man, but rather to demand candour from the state about the facts. Successive left-leaning outlets have scrambled to debunk Tory shadow justice minister Robert Jenrick’s claim that Afghans and Eritreans are 20 times more likely than Britons to be convicted of sexual offences. It is true his figures come from a partisan source – freedom-of-information data compiled by the Centre for Migration Control. Yet rather than demand better data, feminists would rather avoid the conversation entirely.

Most striking is the willingness to ignore women’s personal testimony. Notably, the Guardian – that proud champion of #MeToo and ‘believe women’ – suddenly forgets its feminist principles when the testimony comes from women and girls in Epping, Oxford or Wakefield. Their reports of assaults by migrant men living in asylum hotels are airily brushed aside. In an outstanding feat of logical agility, columnist Zoe Williams even blamed protesters for setting the suspects a bad example. She wrote: ‘If your accommodation is regularly surrounded by a small, hostile mob that sometimes wants to set fire to it, it’s probably quite difficult to slot into a normal, law-abiding life, or even know what a law-abiding life looks like, in this country you escaped to, having heard it was civilised.’

Suddenly we’re not meant to remember that the justice system routinely fails women when it comes to sexual offences – that only 3.6 per cent of reported rapes result in a charge. The courage it takes to speak out about harassment and attacks by men, regardless of their nationality, is forgotten. Instead, the script is flipped: complainants are recast as vindictive girls or hysterical women, their testimony dismissed as fodder for the right.

Undoubtedly, some of what’s being shared about migration and crime is exaggerated and politicised. In an economy where clicks are monetised, it is often the most outrageous stories that take off. And it’s true that racists have a long history of weaponising sexual violence to push their agenda. But the overarching problem is that we simply don’t have the data. Arrests, charges, convictions and prison figures all tell slightly different stories, and even ‘nationality’ is recorded inconsistently – sometimes by passport, sometimes by country of birth, sometimes not at all. What we do know is that around one in 10 men jailed for sexual offences is a foreign national. That is hardly evidence of rampant over-representation, but nor does it suggest migrant men are blameless paragons of virtue.

For years, girls abused by Pakistani Muslim rape gangs were told by those in the service of the state – tacitly and explicitly – that speaking up would fuel bigotry. It was easier, particularly for those whose job it was to protect them, to believe they were troublesome ‘child prostitutes’ who were disposable anyway. Their abusers knew this, too. The same mechanism is at work today across the mainstream left – and shamefully within the women’s sector. While we can all agree that ‘isms’ are bad, the spectre of racism now seems to override all other concerns. Women are expected to tolerate misogyny and silencing for the supposed greater good.

And this is precisely the problem. By rushing to declare the debate closed, women’s organisations may think they are shutting down racists – but they are also shutting up potential victims. Where should a woman raped by an undocumented migrant go if the local rape-crisis centre is issuing press releases insisting such men are no more dangerous than anyone else? In a similar vein, where does a woman assaulted by a trans-identified male turn when the same organisations solemnly announce that ‘transwomen are women’? If women and girls cannot trust support services to acknowledge the reality of their experience – free from any political agenda – then they will not come forward.

Ultimately, the call to ‘believe women’ makes no sense if it comes with an asterisk. What is needed is for organisations that tackle male violence to return to their core purpose and to take women’s fears seriously. Right now, their posturing is helping no one. It makes it harder for women to speak and easier for perpetrators to hide.

Jo Bartosch is co-author of the upcoming book, Pornocracy. Pre-order it here.